^The references in the movie's dialogue are consistent with a 20th-century date for the Eugenics Wars, I believe.
First details of nuKhan prequel comic
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I think you mean Sacha Baron Cohen (Brand was never attached to the project, but just a persistent rumor) who is Israeli-English and was selected because he bears a passing resemblance to Mercury. (And who just left the that film a week ago!)
As well, we do know that they were looking for actors who did look like Montalaban, or had a similar heritage. Benecio del Toro (Puertro Rican) was in the role but left and Edgar Raimerz (Venezuelan) from Zero Dark Thirty was a contender for the role. It seems likely that somewhere around this stage Orci, Kurtzman and Lindelof decided to reign in the Khan-iness and went for the more generic Harrison before putting the Khan back in. While I think Cumberbatch did a great job, there is a part of me that feels a twinge about the casting of the whitest of white guys to play Khan. I still think the most logical choice was Naveen Andrews, especially with JJ's penchant for utilizing actors he's worked with in other mediums.
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I wonder how the comic will go about explaining the healing power of Khan's blood, and how and when Khan becomes aware of this. I hope it isn't something that was with him before he even fled on the Botany Bay, as if he had the ability back then and knew about it, why didn't he use it to save Marla on Ceti Alpha V?
You're right, it was Baron Cohen. Apparently there was a rumor Brand was going to play Freddie. Would there be as much uproar if a Hispanic actor played Khan? Which to me sounds like the old "All brown people are the same" approach common in the Hollywood of yore.
The whitest of white guys is Jim Gaffigan.
A couple of reasons I can think of:
-He had no means of doing a blood transfusion on Ceti Alpha V.
-The eel may have caused damage to her brain beyond Magic Blood's ability to heal. Presumably it doesn't work on every mortal wound. If someone had severe damage to an integral organ, I imagine there's nothing it could do.
I finally had that conversation with the work colleague's partner who recently had experimental blood serum therapy. She was one of six people in the world in a new clinical trial. 300 mls of her own blood was reduced to about 13 mls of blood serum, and injected into a chronically troublesome tendon in her foot. The serum has stimulated the tendon to repair itself in a matter of weeks, when several years of attempts to let nature heal it had failed to make any difference.
Similar amazing results are being explored using donated blood platelets and stem cells from foetal umibilical cords.
"Magic Blood" in the early 21st Century.
I don't think it needs explaining. I posted this in the ENT forum awhile ago:
The ENT Augments trilogy works as perfectly as a prequel to Into Darkness as it does "Space Seed" and Wrath of Khan . I love how new Treks can make us look back at older episodes or movies slightly differently. ID sheds new light on Henry Archer's death:
SOONG: They're the future. They're stronger, smarter, free from sickness, with life spans twice as long as our own. You, more than anyone, should appreciate what this means.
ARCHER: Why me?
SOONG: Your father suffered from Clarke's Disease. His final years were marked with extreme pain.
ARCHER: My father has nothing to do with this.
SOONG: He didn't need to suffer. Genetic engineering could've cured him. Those who want to suppress my Augments are the same ones who condemned your father to death.
(from "Borderland" http://www.chakoteya.net/enterprise/80.htm )
...all it would have taken to save Henry Archer was an injection of whatever's in Khan's blood, as we saw with Lucille Harewood at the start of Into Darkness and at the end with Kirk - technology which has been outlawed on Earth since 1996.
As for Marla, we have no clue how she died. If it was brain bugs, I doubt healing blood would cure madness - if anything (as we may see in STXIII), it'd cause it.
I think my point still stands that an alien parasite totally wrecking someone's brain might be beyond the abilities of Khan's blood to heal.
I wasn't debating that bit. I was pointing out that the concept wasn't so "magic" even in today's news.
Totally agree that Marla's madness couldn't be reversed/restored after that Ceti eel chomped through her cerebral cortex.
On connections between the Enterprise Augment episodes and the new movie. The Klingons deformed themselves in an effort to compete with Human augments. Imagine how they would react is they learn another lone augment has killed a large group right on their home planet!
Actually, Khan does say that it was the Ceti eel which killed McGivers ("it killed twenty of my people...including my beloved wife"). And if he had used his blood to treat her, it might have caused her body to expel or kill the eel as a foreign substance.
There's a difference in using something from your own body to cure something and having someone else's blood to cure, not a chronic condition in the same body, but a wasting disease in a child, bringing a dead tribble back to life as well as curing someone of radiation sickness. Having Khan's blood do one of those things would be amazing enough. Doing all three makes you wonder what it cannot do. Regenerating brain tissue may be beyond it's capability or perhaps Marla had simply lost too much for the blood to repair. She might have even been the first person that the eels attacked or was away from the other colonists for some reason. Perhaps Khan was the only one what would have even considered saving her. The rest of Khan's people may have considered her weak and expendable and the eels simply provided a means to get rid of her without bringing down the Wrath of Khan upon themselves.
As I said, similar amazing results are being explored today using donated blood platelets and stem cells from foetal umibilical cords. In countries that haven't outlawed it.
Then again, the fact that the eels were able to kill so many of Khan's people is evidence that simply having Augment genetic material in your body won't save you from them.
There is no reason to assume that. Kirk had suffered from fatal radiation damage, which is damage on a genetic and molecular level, disrupting cell function and replication so the body's cells can't be repaired or replaced. Lucille Harewood had an unspecified terminal condition, which may well have been genetic or involved failures on the cellular level. We don't know what killed the tribble, but if it died of old age, say, that's a cellular/genetic/molecular process as well. And of course Khan is genetically augmented, his abilities due to changes in his genes and probably the associated epigenetic mechanisms. This might include an enhanced ability for genetic and cellular repair. So it stands to reason that Khan's blood would be effective at healing genetic or molecular-level damage.
But what you're talking about, expelling a parasite, is an immune reaction, not a repair mechanism. It's a totally different biological process, like the difference between driving off an invading army and rebuilding the city they trashed. So there's no reason to assume Khan's blood could function as a super-immune system as well as a super-repair system. It doesn't follow that it could drive out a parasite.
Unless nuKhan's blood consist of nanites, it could do nothing of any sort, so I find the argument whether it can expell a parasite or only heal damage on a molecular level extremely funny.
So why are scientists bothering to research stem cells?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_cell
Adding 200 years to the miracles they are already achieving seems possible to me.
I doubt it. Besides, what possible 20th century genetic modification could there be that 23rd post alien-contact McCoy doesn't know of. If there was a way to heal radiation damage in the 20th century, it would be known of 300 years later.
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